I'm a transplanted Brit, living in Greece for the past quarter of a century.
Long of limb, broad of beam, open of mind and impatient of nature, I can sometimes wreak havoc without meaning to.
But I MEAN well....

Friday, 28 March 2014

That’s it. I’ve
had enough. I been suppressed and subjugated enough. I’m mad as hell and I not
going to take it anymore.

No more will I bow to the will of the Humans. No more
will I allow them to exclude me from tabletops, cupboards and toilet bowls. I’m
a grown cat and it’s time I asserted my independence and took my stand as a
Free Feline.

So, with a
little help from that anarchist magpie who sits in the tree outside the back
balcony, I have drafted my Declaration of Independence. Here it is…

When in the course
of feline events, it becomes necessary for one mammal to dissolve the political
bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of
the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature entitle
them, a decent respect to the opinions of catkind requires that they should
declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these
truths to be self-evident:
- that all cats are created equal (though some are more equal than others);
- that cats are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life,
liberty and the purr-suit of happiness;
- that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is
the right of cats to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government to
effect their safety and happiness.

When a long
train of abuses and usurpations is evident, it is the right and duty of every
cat to throw off such oppression. The history of DanglyMan and Big Red’s reign
over my dominion is one of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in
direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny. To prove this,
let facts be submitted to a candid world:

my inalienable
right to sit on any surface I should so desire is consistently denied by humans
using their greater size to enforce their rule (if that PC isn’t designed for
sitting on, then why, pray, is it warm?);

my natural
dietary needs are disregarded, and sustenance only given in the form of bland
dry biscuits that smell like human halitosis (the worst kind);

I am treated as
a mere plaything, passed from one human to another, with no consideration for
my wishes or needs;

cruel and
unusual forms of torture – specifically, the box of screaming demons and
NoisyKid’s use of the thing with strings in combination with the loud box - have
consistently been used against my person to manipulate my conduct in accordance
with the desires of the human population;

my dignity has
been insulted by the enforced use of a pile of gravel in which to perform my
ablutions;

human cushions
refuse to remain in their assigned place once they have been established as an
official cat resting place. As a result, my rest is disrupted on a daily basis,
reducing my tally of sleep hours to a mere 20.

For the above
stated hurts, and many more unstated, I, the Representative of the United Feline
Brethren of this house do solemnly publish and declare I am a free and independent
entity, absolved from all allegiance to DanglyMan and Big Red, and all
political connection with the same to be totally dissolved.

I am a Free and
Independent cat, with the full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances,
establish commerce, and to do all other things which independent entities may do.
And in support of this Declaration, I pledge my life, my fortune and my sacred honour.

Thursday, 27 March 2014

Tulip Frobisher stared
blankly at the cursor blinking accusingly from the top left hand of the empty
screen.

She huffed, pursed her lips in precisely the way she knew a woman knocking
on the door of 50 shouldn’t, and glanced over at the chair to her left. From
its depths came an equally accusing blink from Blott, her white cat named for
the black splodges that made him look like someone had shook an old-fashioned
fountain pen over him.

Or perhaps it was an unconscious tribute to Tom Sharpe?

A sip from the ceramic
imitation of a cardboard take-out gourmet coffee cup made her feel a
little more like a Hampstead hipster than she really was. She looked back at
the screen and hovered her hands over the keyboard. The Peruvian Fairplay
coffee fought with the whipped milk topping it as they slipped down her throat
and completely failed to deliver the double shot of adrenaline and inspiration
she was looking for.

“Stop worrying about what you’re going to
write – just start typing, and the words will come,” she muttered.

Her fingers stayed
stubbornly levitating an inch above the keys, quivering slightly in anticipation
of the words of wit and wisdom (or perhaps utter wankiness) that were waiting
to spill from their tips – any minute now….

A slightly discordant ‘ding!’ alerted her to a new addition to
the growing list of unattended mails in her In Box. Guilt kicked in and her
index finger dropped to the mouse to click and see what was waiting for her ‘paid
for’ attention. Blah, blah…. 800 words,
snappy headline… blah, blah… get all the
corporate buzzwords in and make sure you quote X, Y, Z as well as Ms Alpha and
Mr Omega too. Deadline: 3pm today.

Tulip glanced at her
wrist. That didn’t help – no watch. A look at the bottom of her screen told her
she had just over two hours to churn out the blurb. Sighing heavily, but
secretly slightly relieved to escape the blinking cursor on her blank page, she
set to…

…90 minutes, three
coffees and a sloppy cheese sandwich later, she has her first draft ready – bar
the blanks waiting for missing info, inevitable discussions about who says what
and demands to jam the hated jargon back into her copy – and was gleefully hitting
the “Send” button that would put the ball back into someone else’s court.

She could churn out
the words for others, pretty much on demand. So why couldn’t she do it
for herself?

Back to the blank
screen, this time with a cup of green tea in her hand, in case the missing
ingredient was a little touch of Zen.

“Write what you know,” she said, repeating the mantra of
her old English teacher a lifetime ago.

But really, would
anyone WANT to read what she knew, when it was pretty much the same thing that every second woman born in lower-middle England in the 1960s knew? She’d been beaten to it on the confessional
diary front by Bridget Jones and the rampaging herds of chick-lit, Mummy-lit
and Menopause-lit stream of consciousness novels she had spawned.

She was simply too
ordinary, too normal. She had not overcome any massive obstacles to make her
way in life – not even a smidge of dyslexia or depression to make her date with her ordinary destiny heroic. Nor did she come from privileged but potty Bohemian
aristocracy to give her story an edge of high-born eccentricity.

She was just plain
ordinary, without blood, sweat or tears or mad auntie in the ancestral attic.

Her name wasn’t even
Tulip Frobisher – nothing so Primrose Hill, much to her regret. Her real name,
like her, was much more middling. She had picked her non de plume with her second favourite spring flower in mind, after
she realised that Daffodil Jones was just a little bit too “Look you, Boyo” for whatever masterpiece she was eventually going to turn
out.

She cast her mind back
over the week’s headlines. The media had pretty much all the angles and maddest scenarios
for disappearing aeroplanes covered, and anyway they’d already been beaten to
it by the writers of “Lost” and, long before them, Stephen King in ‘The
Langoliers’.

The state of the
economy and the political posers pretending to do something about the mess they themselves had created
just made her fume, and there were already more than enough ranters out there
without adding to the racket.

“Look inside” she said out loud, startling Blott from his
slumber to throw a sulky stare in her direction. She shuddered the goose that
had walked over her grave off her shoulder and remembered the voices she used
to hear, or thought she heard, from the top of her wardrobe when she was an awkward ten-year-old
with pretensions of becoming a poetess. What had they been? Her overripe pre-pubescent imagination? Lurking
psychosis? Ghosts? Or the spectres of some deeply-buried trauma?

No, she wouldn’t be
going there. Not today.

Anyway, those voices – one male and silkily sarcastic, the other female and
with a harsh edge like a slap across the cheek – had made their appearance
around about the same time she got all Evangelistic, learning huge chunks of
the Bible by heart and having nightly catch-up chats with God (He didn’t
answer, which was probably just as well, and she figured He was just too busy). They stopped a couple of years later when her reading habits landed
her equally compulsively in the arms of H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, George Orwell,
Jules Verne and (her greatest and most enduring obsession) Douglas Adams.

That, she decided, was
probably the problem. She had read and worshipped the words that seemed to
spill so effortlessly and eloquently from those minds packed with original
ideas that she felt like a literary cripple whenever she tried to emulate them.

But surely even those
great minds had their moments of doubts before they started spewing their
worlds onto the page? Didn’t they ever sit bewildered in front of an empty page
or screen wondering who could possibly want to read any words they might find
to fill it with?

One thing’s for sure,
if you write nothing, no-one would read you.

Tulip threw the last
of the bitterly insipid tea down her throat, clunked the cup onto the
table and poised like Blott when he was ready to jump on a house fly, or a sun
beam, preparing to attack the keys.

A double “ding!” brought her back. That urgent
article, back to her with a long list of changes for her to accept or argue.

Friday, 21 March 2014

There’s a change in
the air. A smell of 'green' in it. Fresh buds are poking through the
branches on trees I can see from the windowsill. Birds are singing (squawking
their heads off, if I’m honest). Skies are clear and the days are longer.

And naturally, as is
normal in the feline world, I’m in especially bouncy mood.

Unfortunately, the
humans have welcomed spring with slightly less joy.

Whilst I’m doing my Wall
of Death act around of the living room walls, wrestling NoisyKids’ socks into
submission, chasing sunbeams as they dance on the ceiling or throwing myself
face-first at (closed) doors and windows, they’re sitting there with rheumy
eyes, blocked nasal passages and an all-round hang-dog look on their faces. Every
half an hour or so, DanglyMan’s face explodes at least three times in a row, Big Red makes a noise like a
lost baby elephant snorting into a tissue (which she refuses to let me play with) and NoisyKid
coughs and wheezes like a broken-down steam organ.

In short, they’re no
bloody fun.

They blame something
they call “allergies” and it seems to be preventing them from relishing the
joys of the season. I’ve tried to cheer them up, I rely have. But to no avail.

I try to show them how great all this new life exploding all over the place –
yes, even those weird long-legged mosquitoes that have appeared in the corners –
by performing my world-famous Jump Jet vertical take-off whenever they walk
into the room. I bring them little gifts (or I will once I manage to catch one
of those Daddy Long Legs). I stretch out alluringly in the patch of bright sunlight
threatening to fade the bedroom carpet.

But nothing works. My
efforts are met with cries of “Bloody nutter!”, “Euw, gross, Joker!” and “Get
outter my way, cat”, as they stumble half-blind towards the next box of tissues
that they seem to go through at this time of the year as the same rate that I get through sachets
of Whiskas.

What’s a cat to do? Here
I am alone, surrounded by misery-merchants and isolated from my own kind. OK, so I’ve never actually MET
another cat seeing as my humans were the ones who got the privilege of weaning
me, washing me and wiping my elegant behind before I got sick of their clumsy efforts
and took over the job myself. But I have seen the neighbourhood cats from the windowsill
as I survey the world from our first floor flat. Frankly, honest I’m not that
impressed. Most of them look like rather a rough lot, in good of a good all-over licking, and certainly not the
kind of creature someone of my caliber should mix with. Well, all except that cute little tabby who sits teasingly on the back wall of an afternoon – but that’s
another story, and if I’m honest, I really haven’t worked out how I feel about
that quite yet….

….but I digress. Now,
where was I? Oh yes, the joys of spring and the fact that my humans are being
miserable so-and-sos in response to it.

I don’t know, anyone
would think they prefer the cold, dark, wet days of winter to the general
wakey-uppiness that late March has brought. No pleasing some folk, I suppose.

So, until they get
over their (waggles paws on either side of head to indicate ‘so-called’)
allergies, I suppose I’ll just have to occupy myself with plans on how to
capture that wretched blackbird that wakes me up every afternoon with his infernal
twittering (“how rude!”).

And then there’s
always the tabby who might be charmed by an elegant pie-bald prince sitting in
the window. Now, if I can just work out how to get from here… to there.

Thursday, 20 March 2014

You know how it is. Those days when dragging your body
out of bed feels like a Herculean task, and raising a smile for your fellow
humans feels like two cables attached to anvils are hooked to each corner of
your mouth. You know you’re lucky to alive, well, free, etc., but you still have days when you’re sorely tempted to tell the world to go whistle, and retreat
to your bed and curl up in a foetal ball of misery and self-pity. At least I do.

And then someone delivers an almighty and timely
lesson in positivity.

Today, I got one of those lessons from a truly inspiring woman.

Hilary Lister was born in Kent in 1972 and until the
age of 15 led a pretty normal life until she developed reflex sympathetic
dystrophy. But that didn't stop her from studying biochemistry at Jesus
College, Oxford. She started a PhD at the University of Kent but was unable to
finish it as her condition deteriorated (since then, she’s been awarded an
honorary doctorate by the University).

She didn't let her condition stand in the way when
she was introduced to sailing in 2003, something which she says gave her life new
meaning and purpose.

She wasn’t kidding. In 2005,
she became the first quadriplegic to sail solo across the English Channel. In
2007, she became the first female quadriplegic to sail solo round the Isle of
Wight and in 2009, she sailed solo around Britain. Undaunted by her physical limitations, Hilary uses innovative 'sip-and-puff' technology to control her boat's steering and sails.

Today, she arrived in
Muscat to claim yet another record after becoming the first paralysed
woman to complete the 850NM voyage from Mumbai in India to the in Oman. Her
sailing partner, Omani-yachtswoman Nashwa Al Kindi (pictured here with Hilary at the press conference after their arrival), also made history as the
first Arab female sailor to complete the journey.

Back on dry land, Hilary says the hardest part
was getting off the boat: “I never wanted to get off!”

She adds: “We had a few challenges, but for me
it's all about pushing yourself to the limit. It’s meeting those challenges that
gives me so much pleasure.

“We had some fun moments too. There were dolphins and whales along the way –
and I even got slapped in the face by a flying fish. And at night, the sight of
phosphorescence on the water and clear starry skies is absolutely beautiful.”

I know about Hilary
because she is an ambassador for GAC Pindar, a competitive yachting team and marine
leisure logistics specialist associated with the company I work for. And I feel
priviledged for that – but also more than a little sad and puzzled why her name
is not better known.

Women
like Hilary are the ones who should be hitting the headlines and setting the
standard as role models, along with courageous girls like the now teen
education-campaigner Malala Yousafzai. There’s something seriously wrong when young girls
aspire to looking and acting like plastically-enhanced bimbos with
mind-bogglingly complicated love lives who make a fortune from their bodies but
insist that it’s actually a form of liberation and empowerment, rather than
looking up to the real heroines of our age.

Hilary,
and others like her, made me feel shallow, and humble. But they also deliver a
valuable reminder of the importance of making the most of things.

She
says: "When you spend 24 hours a day confined to a wheelchair, or a bed,
sailing is the ultimate freedom. I have the wind in my hair and the spray in my
face. I'm alive."

No
nonsense, no self-pity, no pleas for special treatment. Just a clear and honest
determination to grab the best from the deal life has dealt her and a flat
refusal to let anyone or anything stop her.

Friday, 14 March 2014

I’m special, you all
know that. But now I know that I’m really special. Don’t take my word for it,
ask the experts.

For greater minds that
yours have deemed that I am CAD. That’s ‘Cat Attention Deficient’ and it’s a
genuine affliction that plagues the highly intelligent and naturally gorgeous.
It means that…

… ...what? Oh, yeah.

…sorry about that,
there was a flash of light outside the window I had to investigate. You never
know, it might have been a scout heralding an alien invasion, or a
flash of exploding dynamite, or something I could eat. Turns out, it wasn’t.

Now, where was I? Oh
yes. CAD.

Eminent animal behavioural
specialists have studied me (those lucky
people, must have been fascinating and easy on the eye, all at once) and they
have come to the unanimous conclusion that I am one of a rare breed of all-round
superior beings to be CAD.

But pity for poor feline
so gifted. We never have a moment’s peace.

Not for us the joys of
settling down in front of the box with the moving pictures for a couple of
hours of a night like DanglyMan and Big Red do. Or standing over a pan sitting
on the hot box in the kitchen, patiently stirring til something interesting
happens?

Oh no.

You know when you’re
sitting there concentrating on some important task at hand, like stalking an
ant, investigating the contents of a plastic bag on the kitchen table, or
chewing that splodge-shaped black dot on your left foot, when something compels you to throw yourself into the air and gallop round the room,
then down the corridor where you collide head-first into the closed balcony
door?

Or when you’re settling down for a nice satisfying pooh or burying the
one you did earlier in the sand, when a motorbike farts along the road
distracting you from your important task in hand?

Or you can’t settle down for
a nice leisurely lick in a pool of sunshine when you suddenly become obsessed
with the twitching tip of your tail?

You don’t?
Well, I shouldn’t be surprised really. We all know who the special one is
around here, don’t we?

It’s like trying to
catch every single note as it comes out of the speakers when a particularly
twiddly piece of baroque music is played. Great fun at first - but ultimately
exhausting.

That's why we
cats have to sleep so much. We are knackered - all the time - as a direct result of our CAD disorder.

It’s the cross we
have to bear – and all part of the deal when you’ve got a butterfly mind…

Saturday, 8 March 2014

So this is
International Women’s Day and, to quote John Lennon, what have been done?

We have
come a long way – or at least some of us have. In many parts of the world,
sisters are indeed doing it for themselves.

We have women doctors, lawyers,
politicians too. There’s even the
occasional CEO and token female on the panel of some TV comedy shows.
Strangely enough, however, though we make up 50% of the population, we seem to
claim a much, MUCH smaller fraction of such exulted positions – but I suppose
we should be grateful for small mercies.

We’re certainly not at the stage where we can all pat ourselves on the back and
congratulate society of finally defining people by their qualities and
abilities rather than the equipment lurking beneath their business suit,
overalls or medical smock.

Some of us
(OK, hands up. Yes, I admit it, I mean me) scoff at the very concept of a
special day dedicated – usually in name and shallow tokens only – to women.

“One WHOLE day? Wow, gee thanks, boys! That
makes us feel SO special! And thanks, but no thanks, I won’t take that red rose
you’re handing out to every female you meet today to feed your smugness at what
an enlightened, sensitive man you are.”

There’s
still a way to go. In many ways, again to quote Lennon, woman still is the nigger of the world. (Speaking of Lennon, isn't it interesting that he's virtually revered whilst Yoko Ono is still largely vilified? Wonder why? Don't answer, it's rhetorical.)

As I write
this, apparently emancipated working women around Europe are getting up three
hours earlier than the rest of the household to make a head start on the
housework they haven’t had time to do during the week, whilst the menfolk gently snore their way into the weekend.

In remote Indian
villages, women with no access to the sanitary products you and I take for
granted every month put their health at risk by using unclean rags
that they are too embarrassed to hang out in the sun after washing.

In
businesses around the world, female go-getters are labelled bitches and have vicious
rumours spread about their personal lives to explain their success. Ambitious
women find themselves biting back tears of frustration when visitors arriving
for that important meeting where they’ll make the main presentation ask
them to bring them their coffee black with two sugars. And that's simply an added, everyday insult to the fact that they probably earns less
than the guys who joined on the same day, and with the same
qualifications.

Girls thirsty
for knowledge put their lives at risk for the chance of an education (don’t ask
me, ask Malala).

Middle-aged
housewives work themselves into paroxysms of existential angst as the first
wrinkles and sags threaten to erase their attractiveness and consign them to the army
of invisible dowdy old biddies. Some tolerate almost any humiliation rather than face a future without a man. The very hint of a feminist dialogue is shouted
down in seemingly reasonable households and dismissed as “There she goes, banging the 'Women’s Issues' drum again”.

Somewhere
in Africa, an eight-year-old girl lies bleeding and in agony in her bed after
being subjected to a brutal genital mutilation dictated as proper by the
society she’s growing up in. No-one explains to her why - probably because no-one can, at least not rationally.

In Australia’s New South Wales, three-quarters of
all women who are killed lose their lives at the hands of ‘loved ones’ asserting
some perverted sense of ownership or control through their violence.

The
beatification of motherhood is used as a double-edged sword that obliges women
to put everyone’s needs above their own. To martyr themselves at the altar of the family
by abandoning their own hopes, dreams, ambitions or simply their preferred brand of coffee
in favour of those of her husband and children. We accept that psychological
prison proudly with declarations of “My children are my life”, “Family is
everything” and “I’m there for them” whilst slowly but inexorably losing sight
of ourselves. [Please note, I am not anti-family, anti-marriage or anti-kids. I
love my husband, and I would walk through fire for my son. I don't want to imagine my life without them, but they are NOT my
whole life. I was here first, and it’s me – if the demon of dementia permits - that will be here til the bitter end.]

Everywhere,
we are judged by the way we look. We all accept it to some extent or another, whether
by bowing to the tyranny of conceived beauty by starving ourselves, injecting
poison into our faces to wipe out any trace of character and squeezing ourselves
into impossibly uncomfortable undergarments or vertigo-inducing heels, or accepting
the myth that the female form is inherently evil and that we should obey edicts about what to wear,
how to move, when to speak and what to think.

Young girls are conditioned into
obsessions with pink, prettiness and passive-aggression, and those of us who
fall short of the how we’re told girls are supposed to look and act suffer a
lifetime of inner demons and insecurity.

So, this is
International Women’s Day. It’s not St Valentine’s Day Mark II, as the media
and advertising industry want us to believe as they guilt-trip men into buying
yet more flowers and chocolates.

It’s supposed to celebrate what’s been
achieved so far in the voyage to a time when we will all be treated and judged
equally regardless of our gender. But more importantly, it’s a chance to
highlight what’s still left to be done – today and every day of the year.

So, thanks,
but no thanks. I don’t want your flowers, or your chocolates (I'm perfectly capable of getting them myself). And I won’t be celebrating token news
bites about “women making their way in a man’s world” thrown at us by the
media.

I’m just going to do what I do 365 days a year - do my best at being a woman, being human, being me.